The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generation after generation with smaller and more complex circuits. During the course of this evolution, functional density has increased, while geometry size has decreased. This scaling down generally has led to production efficiencies and lowered costs. However, such scaling also increased processing and fabrication complexities. These complexities can have their own associated costs.
For example, as technology nodes decrease, one rising cost is the requirement of extensive volumes of chemicals used to support the manufacturing process and its complexity. The increase in chemical volume over time has associated costs of not only the acquisition of the chemical itself, but also in environmental impact. One process demanding great volumes of chemical is the wafer cleaning process. Wafer cleaning processes are performed through-out the fabrication process of an IC. Exemplary conventional cleaning processes are “standard clean 1” and “standard clean 2” also referred to as SC1 and SC2. The cleaning processes are typically used to remove particles (e.g., SC1) and/or metal ions (e.g., SC2). Although these existing cleaning processes have been generally satisfactory for specific purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects.